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Seen this appear then vanish in my news feed not sure if it was taken down.
Newcastle owner Mike Ashley is accused of making decisions to p*** people off – he sounds PERFECT for Rangers says Bill Leckie
The Sports Direct chief has already had a bad experience at Ibrox but a fresh bid could be the best thing for a Gers board that needs to show their hand
By Bill Leckie
29th October 2017, 11:54 pm
FORMER Newcastle keeper Shay Given has accused club owner Mike Ashley of making decisions just to p*** off players and fans.
Which makes him sound the perfect fella to buy Rangers.
Mike Ashley
After all, that seems to be how Ibrox rolls these days, in an ever-decreasing cycle of self-sabotage, lurching from crisis to crisis of its own making.
So what odds on the smirking, loveless Ashley getting the Geordie monkey off his back for, say, £200million, chucking a quarter of it at Dave King and saying: “Go on then, son, raise me.”
As unpalatable as this may sound to your average Bluenose, they’d have to admit it’s the kind of thing the guy would do.
After all, he has unfinished business there — and let’s be honest, someone must light a match under King’s feet sooner or later, because if not the place will crumble.
Shay Given in action for Stoke City
In the wake of Pedro Caixinha’s laughably inevitable sacking, a university business professor called Chris Brady described the situation as “financially disastrous” and predicted Rangers are in for “a wasted year or more”.
Which is, with all due respect to the prof, like looking out the window at giant puddles in the road and boldly concluding that it had rained overnight.
Rangers have wasted most of the past decade, along with tens of millions of pounds they couldn’t afford, not to mention the patience and goodwill of one of the most blindly-devoted supports in world football.
Listen, I’ve never held back on how backward their bigoted songbook is and how boorish their collective demeanour can be.
But how can you not have even a grudging admiration when 14,000 turn up for an away game after a week when they’ve lost a cup semi, been held at home by perennial relegation strugglers and seen the manager binned?
As stated many times, the club has for too long taken this devotion for granted — yet it also makes the fans their own worst enemy.
They ALLOW the club to take them for granted.
Everyone knows they will always be there, especially when times are tough, because they’re damned if they’ll show the outside world any sign of weakness.
They are, in many ways, like the huge and endearingly-optimistic Toon Army Ashley has milked for every last penny over most of the last decade.
Newcastle fans are loud and enthusiastic, they travel to away games in big numbers and they generally behave pretty well, which is enough to convince them that theirs is a great club, despite it having won nothing of any significance since 1969 and before then not since 1955.
For Ashley, the king of piling stuff high and selling it cheap to a low common denominator, such saps — sorry, diehards — are manna.
Which is why it makes sense his next move, even if only to p*** people off, would be Ibrox.
For some, of course, the experience of being a short-lived Rangers shareholder and board member who was made to feel as welcome as the Pope doing the half-time draw would have forever put them off setting foot in the place again.
Ashley, though, clearly revels in being disliked.
He has the thick skin of a Donald Trump or Jeremy Kyle, never happier than when catcalls ring in his ears and people ask how he can sleep at night.
Which isn’t to say he’ll ever actually own Rangers.
But he might just be the man to force action from those who do, the ones who stumbled and bumbled and sleepwalked their way into liquidation, then back into the top division and back once more towards a future hobbled by debt.
Pedro Caixinha
I wrote when Caixinha walked that he wasn’t to blame for the past seven months, that it was the fools who reckoned he was the right appointment.
My fellow columnist Davie Provan followed this up by claiming Rangers didn’t need a new manager, just a new owner.
We don’t always agree, but in this case it’s hard not to.
By time up at Murrayfield on Saturday, it was like those seven months hadn’t happened, what with Graeme Murty getting a tune out of them as caretaker manager and Kenny Miller tucking away the goals and kissing the badge.
You could have put the kettle on for Miller getting the call and promptly sticking it right up the gaffer who’d made him the scapegoat for everything that was wrong with the dressing room.
But the inescapable fact is that those seven months DID happen, just as all the nonsense of the years stretching back to David Murray’s house of cards leadership happened.
And the bottom line today, for all that those at the top of the marble stairs stick their fingers in their ears and ignore it, is that no one with any clout or any idea of financial sense has done a damn thing to turn Rangers back into a credible business or a credible football club.
Do I think Ashley is the guy to put that right? Even if I cared if anyone ever puts it right?
Kenny Miller celebrates with his Rangers team-mates
Probably not, mostly for the reasons Given puts up, that Ashley’s constantly at war with the world rather than getting people onside with him.
But, boy, it would be interesting if he floated the idea of buying out King and Co.
It would make them show their hand, make them decide whether they had the bottle for a battle.
It might be the catalyst for Rangers becoming something like great again.
If, that is, it didn’t finally break them.

I Dont think the songs should be sung at games but The day an msp walked into parliament wearing a taig top the game was up. Someone sings FTP and they can get the jail and banned but in England they can burn an effigy of the pope and its celebrated.